BlackRock continues to increase its stake in Africa’s largest wind farm, which has a generating capacity of 310MWh.

Denmark’s Vestas Wind System, which has been keen to sell its stake in Lake Turkana since 2015, has sold its entire 12.5% stake to Climate Finance Partnership (CFP), managed by the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock – which has $9.1 trillion in assets under management.

The two parties have declined to reveal the amount of the transaction, which has been under discussion since March 2023. For the group, this “sale is in line with Vestas’s strategy of developing wind farms without owning them on a long-term basis”.

CFP, which acquired the shares held by Finnfund, the Finnish development bank, in 2023, also bought the 6.25% stake held by the Investment Fund for Developing Countries (IFU) on the same day as the Vestas deal.

Reik Haahr Müller, senior vice-president of IFU, said he was “proud to have played an active role in the construction and operation of this pioneering project, which is providing Kenya with affordable and reliable green energy”.

And the fund managed by BlackRock has no intention of stopping there. According to Bloomberg, it was looking to acquire a total 31.25% stake.

Agreement with Alphabet

Located in a semi-desert area of northern Kenya, one of the windiest places in the world, the Turkana power station is linked to the electricity supplier Kenya Power by a 20-year purchase agreement. This agreement enables the plant to cover 14% of the country’s needs, supplying electricity to 1.2 million people.

Vestas Wind System, which had a turnover of €15.3 billion ($16.5 billion) in 2023, will remain at the site, where it is still responsible for maintaining the 365 turbines that form the heart of the plant.

Building of the Lake Turkana wind farm began in 2014. Back in 2015, the Danish company announced that it had signed an agreement with Alphabet, parent company of Google, which was supposed to formalise its buyout in 2017, once the construction work had been completed.

But that work has taken longer than expected: Turkana, which cost KSh70 billion (around $480 million) to build, has only been connected to Kenya’s national electricity grid since 2018. The Silicon Valley giant, which had previously injected $12 million into the South African photovoltaic park Jasper Power Project, finally gave up on the Kenyan project in 2020.